May 28, 2020 at 1:57 p.m.
'We did a very important job over there'
Rhinelander man recalls experiences serving in Vietnam War
'We did a very important job over there'
By Emily Koester-
"They didn't want to know anything about it," he recently said of his time serving during the Vietnam War. "It's like a little kid getting to do something special and the parents don't want to hear about it."
Maloney was well aware of the controversy the Vietnam War was back at home during that time, but he also feels strongly what he and his fellow soldiers were doing overseas during the war was very important.
"We were so angry about all the demonstrations back here in the states," he recalled of what he would hear on the radio. "Probably none of us had originally wanted to go there (Vietnam) - but we felt like we were doing something important, like we were accomplishing something. And then we hear about all these people back here in the states, that are basically condemning what we are doing. ... Why were we giving up? It really upset us."
In March, Maloney helped share the experiences his father - the late George Maloney - had during World War II. This week, he shares his own story of his time in the military during the Vietnam War.
'Secret agent'
When Maloney decided to join the military at the age of 19 on April 19, 1968, he didn't think it would be the Army.
In fact, the Army was his last choice when he went to see the recruiters. He thought he'd follow his father's footsteps and join the Marines.
"When I chose to enlist, I thought, 'I'm going to hear what all the recruiters have to say, and then I'll make my decision.' So I went to the recruiting office in Rhinelander and the Marine recruiter wasn't in the office," Maloney said. "So then I went and talked to the Navy recruiter and I thought, 'Ah well, maybe.' I wasn't so sure."
But Maloney went to the recruiting office with an open mind, and when the Army recruiter realized Maloney wasn't "overly interested" in that branch of service, the recruiter mentioned a secret agency that peaked Maloney's interest.
"He told me of a top secret agency within the Army, but I'd have to enlist for an extra year," Maloney said. "When I was a kid I wanted to be a cowboy, and then I wanted to be a secret agent, and then I wanted to be a cop. Well, I wound up joining the Army with a top secret cryptographic clearance, so that's as close as I got to a spy."
Maloney eventually became a member of the Army Security Agency (ASA), a branch of the Army which, among other functions, provided technical advice on locating enemy transmitters. After the extensive training - "that extra year was nothing but training" - those who were accepted into the program were then split apart and mixed in with those who didn't even know there were ASA members among them. Maloney was one of three sent to the northern part of South Vietnam, just south of the demilitarized zone. He was in I Corps, one of four corps of the Army of the Republic of Vietnam (ARVN).
"We did stuff in intelligence, we tried to locate where the enemy was," Maloney said. "... we tried to decipher their messages, breaking their code."
The information would be gathered and passed on up to superiors and out to the field as needed. Sometimes the information passed on from ASA wasn't believed when it should have been, Maloney said, and other times ASA had incorrect information.
"But I felt like we did a very important job over there," he said. "I hope that we saved a lot of lives over there."
The very first American combat loss in Vietnam during wartime was an ASA cryptologist. Spec. 4 James T. Davis's mission was ambushed on Dec. 22, 1961. After the truck he was in was disabled by a landmine, Davis was shot in the head after he was able to shoot four or five rounds at the enemy from his own rifle.
POW training
Maloney completed basic training at Ft. Leonard Wood, Mo., then for a year went through advanced individual training at Fort Devens in Mass.
"It was tough training, in intelligence work, and code work," Maloney said. "And it was always that pressure of, 'Boy if you don't make it, we're either going to recycle you and/or you're going wherever they want to put you.' And after going through all that work, you don't want to quit. But I will say that no matter who is in the military, and what branch, no matter what they do, I think the military tries to train their people as well as they can."
While in Massachusetts, Maloney endured a most memorable training: that of a prisoner of war (POW).
The training began with an ambush situation, and between the initial capture and being taken to the POW camp, Maloney "escaped" a few times, only to be captured again. In the camp he was put through an interrogation, and with the heads up from a "guard," Maloney was able to escape from the camp through a tunnel. The POW whole experience was very physical.
"It convinced me that I never wanted to be a prisoner of war," Maloney said. "Just to give a feel for the training the military tries to give their people. To me it was a big deal. In that short time I felt so close to being one (POW), imagine if you had gone through that for weeks, or months or the real thing."
From Fort Devens, Maloney then went on to more training at Two Rocks Ranch in Petaluma, Calif., near San Francisco. Two Rocks Ranch was known by locals to be a "top secret place."
"One thing that I do know, anybody with a secret clearance, they're only given information for what they need to know themselves," Maloney said.
Vietnam
Maloney was flown from California to Hawaii, and then on to Vietnam. He arrived in Vietnam on Feb. 17, 1969, and was there just a day shy of a year, until Feb. 16, 1970. When exiting the air conditioned plane, he remembered being greeted by the heat.
"I had never experienced such heat," he said. "By the time I was on the ground, I felt like the heat was pressing me right down into the earth."
Maloney ended up in Saigon, where he got his first taste of what the South Vietnamese people had gone through. He described the children begging in Vietnamese, and old women with the sadness they had gone through written in English on signs they were wearing.
"People like that, they were everywhere," Maloney said. "It wasn't like you could walk down the street like a tourist can, sightsee and really enjoy."
He was temporarily housed for a night in an old French hotel in Saigon, the St. George Hotel. Military police (MP) manned bunkers outside the hotel. There was no elevator, and in Maloney's room on an upper floor, the ceiling fan just went "tick, tick, tick." When opening the window in the room provided little help in cooling him down, Maloney went to splash some water on his face in the bathroom, but the water was rusty, so he went back outside and asked the MPs where he could get a drink. Maloney was directed to a bar in the basement of the hotel.
The bar was dimly lit and so full of soldiers, it was standing room only. Maloney finally made it up to the bar and ordered a beer.
"I'm standing there and I got this beer in my hand and I'm taking a drink and somebody jabs me in the ribs," Maloney said. "And I thought, 'Uh-oh. Somebody wants to have a problem.' And I turned a little bit sideways, and again I tried to take a drink of my bottle of beer, and jabs me in the ribs again! ... Then he did it again, and I swung around to him, and here's this guy that I went to school with ... here is David Elliott, from my class in Elcho School."
Maloney remembered the huge grin on Elliott's face, and the two got drunk together. They wouldn't see each other for another year. At the end of Maloney's tour he returned to Saigon, where he stayed in the new barracks at Tan Son Nhut Air Base.
"I'm in those barracks and I throw my duffle bag on a bed, and I turned around, and standing right in front of me with that same, silly grin on his face was David Elliott again!" Maloney said. "So we got drunk again together! Graduate in a class of 30 kids, and there halfway around the world is David Elliott. It was neat we were together at both ends of that tour."
Entertainment was sparse in Vietnam, and besides seeing the Bob Hope Show, accompanied by the Gold Diggers, the soldiers were left to entertain themselves on the rare occasion they had the time, and very often this entertainment involved drinking. Maloney recalled a night at an NCO Club (non-commissioned officer's club), when one of the guys sitting at his table claimed he'd eat a lizard if they could pool together enough money. Lizards and cockroaches were everywhere at the time.
"We thought that was a pretty good idea," Maloney recalled.
Money was collected and the attention of the entire club was on this man in anticipation. He ordered a beer and a shot from the bar, threw back the shot, took a slug of the beer, and grabbed a lizard by the tail. Holding it over his mouth, he dropped it in, the lizard's tail swishing back and forth between his lips. The lizard went down whole with the rest of the beer.
"You could actually see his Adam's apple swell up and you could see the lizard was just trying to turn around in his throat to get out," Maloney said. "The guy started to change color, his complexion, and we thought he was going to choke to death and he just kept chugging the rest of his beer, and finally the Adam's apple went down. He had swallowed that lizard."
Another time at the NCO Club, in a drunken stupor over a pizza, - "three of them who were drunker than the other two of us ... they are spitting all over the place while they are eating" - a couple of guys decide to make themselves throw up to see "how many colors they can make."
"That's when we got out of there," Maloney said of himself and another guy.
Maloney said letters and correspondence with those at home was very important. He recalled sharing with some other guys a birthday cake his mother had sent with a can of frosting. With the cake, they drank a bottle of drambuie and a 6.5 ounce bottle of coke.
"But we lived for those letters," he said. "Mail call was very important."
Life in Vietnam wasn't all play though, and Maloney - just like his father had experienced with grenade attack during World War II - had his brush with death, only to be saved by a friend.
Remembering Dan Horak
Maloney and his friend, Dan Horak, had been together at Ft. Devens, CaliF., Australia for R&R (rest and recuperation), and in Vietnam.
Maloney was trying to get to the safety of a trench during a rocket attack one day in Vietnam when suddenly he was tackled from behind by Horak.
"Just before I hit the ground, I'm thinking of how angry I am that he did that to me when we are so close to the trench," Maloney said. "And when I hit the ground, this big hunk of shrapnel went right over the top of me. If he hadn't tackled me it would have gone right through me."
Maloney said he regrets never thanking Horak for that moment.
"We were just young kids, you know?," Maloney said. "And like I said, I was angry at him, actually angry at him for saving my life, and I never thanked him for that."
Horak died of cancer just a few years after leaving Vietnam, cancer some think was related to Agent Orange (A defoliant that killed all the vegetation so that the planes could spot the enemy down below).
"'You know what he died of? He died of Agent Orange,'" Maloney recalled of a conversation he had with another Army buddy, Doug Carpenter. "'Don't you remember that day he came back from that detail?' He said Dan was covered with dust from his head to his toes, all over his clothes. He was unloading Agent Orange."
Other unnerving moments include being surrounded by angry ARVNs - who were supposed to be allies - while on sandbag detail, waking up to find a friend had committed suicide, and witnessing from afar what became known as "Hamburger Hill," in the A Shau Valley.
"We drank a lot," Maloney remembered of his time in Vietnam. "There's been a lot of stuff said through the years that kinda stereotyped everybody that went to Vietnam: used drugs and we are all a bunch of losers ... but you know what, the whole time I was in Vietnam ... I never saw anybody use drugs, but we did drink. We drank a lot. When we could, we drank like fish."
'Cowboy'
Maloney was on R&R in Australia when he got close to qualifying himself as a cowboy.
One of the nights in Australia, Maloney went on an organized moonlight horseback ride, and apparently he looked like he knew what he was doing, because he was asked to give up his seat on a calm mare to a girl who hadn't been assigned a horse yet, and instead took a big, beautiful black stallion.
"He was really wild. You could just tell," Maloney said. "I had a hell of a time getting up to the saddle on this stallion. He was a beautiful animal."
At one point during the ride, there was a wide open space where the horses were allowed run, and although his stallion was "raring to go," two people held it back until the other riders were out of sight, and then they told Maloney to "hold on."
"Man what a ride that was. That was a beautiful ride," he said. "But that's my cowboy bit because I stayed on the saddle. That was quite a horse."
Okinawa
After Vietnam, Maloney spent a year and a half on the island of Okinawa, Japan. He was able to visit some of the same places his father had been when he served during World War II. Maloney and his buddies had motorcycles while in Okinawa, and they rode those all over.
"Where I was stationed was where Dad and the 6th Marine Division came on shore," Maloney said. "Right above Tori Station was an old World War II airstrip, and us guys would go up there and just open up on our motorcycles and just give 'er."
This was the same strip where George Maloney remembered a Japanese fighter plane accidently landing and as a result was shot out.
"I wish, when I was over there, my dad could have flown over and we could have seen some of the stuff together, because it was such a different world from when he was there. Okinawa had built back up," Maloney said.
"In those years and the reason we were in Vietnam was because our country was very concerned about and afraid of communism," Maloney said. "We've always wanted to keep track of communist Red China, and when we were in Okinawa, that's kinda what we were concerned about, besides Vietnam. I felt our mission there was very worthwhile, too."
Maloney, Horak, and Carpenter were all promoted to specialist fifth class (E-5) in Vietnam on Jan. 26, 1970. In Okinawa, Maloney held a staff sergeant position (E-6), just without the promotion so he didn't get paid extra. He did, however, have his own room with the barracks and other benefits.
'Cop'
One day while overseas, Carpenter asked Maloney, "What are you gonna do when you get out of the Army?" Maloney had no idea at that point, but Carpenter had just gotten a newspaper from home, and in it he saw the Wisconsin State Patrol was hiring. The two were able to take the written exam while in Okinawa. Once they found out they had passed that exam, they were told they had to be back in Wisconsin for a physical agility test and an oral interview by a certain date, which was a problem as they were both still in the military. While other soldiers were able to be released from duty early due to the war wrapping up, Maloney and Carpenter each had a critical MOS (military occupational specialty). But Maloney, who had his eye on that state patrol position, complained to one of his superiors, who eventually signed his release papers. Carpenter had more time to spend in the Army, and was unable to be released when Maloney was.
Maloney was discharged on Jan. 8, 1972, at the age of 24.
From overseas, he got out of the Army in Oakland, Calif., where he saw how reactions on the homefront to the war were affecting those returning home.
"I saw guys that by then they were so disheartened by the way the people in this country were about Vietnam ... all these uniforms, I saw them throwing them in the dumpsters, they wanted nothing to do with them, with anything military," Maloney said. "They didn't want anybody to know they had ever been in it."
From California he flew into Oshkosh, and the next day, his girlfriend and her parents drove him to Rhinelander.
The next morning he had to be at the armory in Tomahawk for the agility test. A few months later, Maloney went to Madison for final testing and a physical.
He spent a few years in the Madison area as a state trooper before returning to the Rhinelander area in 1974. He was on the patrol for 15 years before becoming a private investigator. Maloney owned and operated Private Investigators & Shadow Security Inc. in the Rhinelander area from 1987-2013.
"Clients included parents who want to find evidence their child's other parent is unfit, cheating husbands or wives, attorneys and insurance companies needing help with research, and individuals who want to locate missing persons," a 2003 article in the Daily News, (now Northwoods River News) said. "He also handled private security matters and served legal papers."
Maloney had three children over the years, Kim and Travis, and Lindsey, his daughter, Kim, passed away from cancer just last year. His dad, George, also passed away last November. But Maloney hasn't been able to forget his time spent in the military.
One thing that still bothers Maloney about the Vietnam War is when someone his age who has never served in the military comments on how the United States should have never gotten involved in the conflict.
"There were a lot of good men - they were boys! But they were men - there were a lot of good men that died over there, and a lot of them believed that what they were doing was worthwhile," he said. "And some of us still believe that."
Emily Koester may be reached at [email protected].
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